BPM in practice: Who is doing what? Hajo Reijers Sander van Wijk - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

BPM in practice: Who is doing what?

Hajo Reijers Sander van Wijk Bela Mutschler Maarten Leurs

Context

• BPM is a “theory in practice” subject:
• direct motivation for research is industrial context of

business processes

• BPM research flourishes
• BPM widely applied in industry
• Positive signs for interaction
• But:
• Do we – as researchers – know sufficiently well what is

going on in industrial BPM projects?

Research set-up

• Cooperation with Deloitte Consulting in the

Netherlands:

• Access to all recent BPM-related projects

(offering, project documentation, consultants)

• General idea:
• Compare characteristics of the projects with those of

the organizations carrying them out

• To fight major source of bias:
• Replication in Germany with Ravensburg-Weingarten

University of Applied Sciences

Selection of BPM projects

• Project:
• has process focus
• meant to facilitate or

assist – future –

• rganizational change
• is (partly) conducted

within an organization in the Netherlands

• has been ended in

2005 or later

• involves consultants

still being active

• Examples:
• Development of

processes to market a new product through an online sales channel

• Improvement of

customer satisfaction through improvement

• f sales processes.

33 projects included

Approach

Relation?

• Organization size

Number of employees (4 classes)

• Profit motive

Profit Non-profit

• Manufacturing / non-manufacturing

Manufacturing Non-manufacturing (i.e. service , government)

• Predominant strategic orientation

Operational excellence (OE)

• “best total cost”

Customer intimacy (CI)

• “best total solution”

Product leadership (PL)

• “best product”
• Trigger

Part of an overarching initiative Independent project

• Business objective

Business performance Business conformance

• Technology emphasis

Yes No

• Focus area

Core processes Support processes Both

• Type of BPM

BPM life cycle phases

Organizational characteristics BPM project characteristics

BPM Life-cycle

Monitoring Design Implementation Evaluation Enactment Analysis

Process model Infrastructure Case data Requirements Requirements Case data

(Mendling, 2008)

Data inspection

• Organizations:
• Vary largely in size

− From less than 50 up to 40000 employees

• Pursue various

predominant strategic

• rientations

− OE (11) − CI (14) − PL (8)

• Are active in a large

number of industries

Data inspection - cont’d

• Projects:
• Triggers are very diverse
• Many projects (18) part of

an overarching initiative

• Business performance

improvement is the main

• bjective (25)
• IT plays an important role
• Sixteen projects have a

technical objective

• In the other projects, IT is
• ften still involved

Findings

• Size matters:
• smaller organizations mainly involved in “early” stages
• f BPM life-cycle (i.e. analysis)
• larger organizations involved in “later” stages (i.e.

implementation and evaluation)

• Strategic orientation gives the flavor:
• In operational excellence organizations BPM projects:

− more commonly independent (rather than part of an

• verarching initiative)

− more often non-technical in nature

• Profit motive and manufacturing / non-manufacturing

are no distinguishing factors

Implications

• Larger organizations (>1000 FTE) more natural

partners for research advanced stages life-cycle

• “Operational excellence” organizations more natural

partners for research with BPM as management discipline

• Organizations with other strategic orientations more

focused on technological side of BPM

• Organizations conducting BPM projects are not tied

to particular domain or profit motive

Closing thoughts

• Geography
• Results only partly reproduced in German study (but at

least no contradictory findings)

• Study has a European perspective:

− What about the Americas and Asia-Pacific?

• Size
• Larger organizations have the money to hire

consultants

• Smaller organizations may display “natural” business

process orientation

Questions?

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